Resting her forehead on the front door she stared down at her shoes, black flats. Tilting her foot sideways she recalled causally mentioning to a man she had been sleeping with how the soles were thinning but still serviceable. He insisted on buying her the current pair.Her phone rang.“Hey, honey.”The cloying, needy tone of the comedian’s voice could almost be twisted into affection when you were high, or act as a buttress to that anxiety that struck like lightning the moment you were alone if you didn’t think too hard about it.“You there?”“I’m locked out of my house.” She pulled on the doorknob and turned the key again. “Are you just getting home? I don’t understand,” he said before she could answer.Yes you do, we both do, she thought. But she wasn’t in the mood to get into this right this second, however unavoidable. “Do you know anything about locks?” He didn’t. She let him go. She had dated a man named Bob who was some kind of handy man. She had dumped him in a rather unpleasant manner she refused to think about. Scrolling through her phone, she gave his number a nice long look, gave the key another turn. It relented. She let the phone tumble into her purse.She was barely inside the entryway of what could only be described as a modest home when that lightning struck. There were hours before she could go to bed with a clean conscience. She placed a hand upon the door frame to steady herself. How am I supposed to fill the time? Especially a day without her daughter Madeline. Abandoning her purse and keys she staggered into her little girl’s room. She had spent nearly every day of her short little life with her but the divorce cleaved their time to a scant and random three days a week depending on how her schedule aligned with Luke’s. Every week she handed him a copy of her schedule and the next night he would tell her when she would see her daughter. Taking a pinch of fish food between her finger and thumb she released it into the slowly leaking aquarium on the dresser crammed with ceramic kitties, two barbies, one white, one black, and several gold star stickers, and ignored the quietly growing puddle circling its base. Surveying the yellow walls a thrush of disgust came over her. Madeline had asked for her room to be painted purple for a long time: six, seven, eight months and (this was no surprise, she thought) she had never gotten to it. She wandered into the garage, took a seat next to a small purple pool of oil, pulled out the blue and gray pipe, lit it up, took a protracted hit and let the effects of the marijuana, which numbed her and made her blossom like a cotton ball tree, come over her. Just the anticipation of getting high brightened her day, every day. Tracing the closest edge of the oil pond she wasn’t sure if it was the weed or the invisible force of habit that now relaxed her. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t do without it.Her phone rang. “I’m feeding Beck.”“So you got inside?” She gave a short sarcastic glance at the phone, “Obviously.”“I still don’t understand how you are just getting home. I thought you were going to come to my set,” he said like a spoiled dopey child and waited. She was certain he was staring at his feet. “I had planned on it.”“But if you had to work late how was that going to happen? You know I hate when you lie.”“I never lie. I’m like superman.”“Tina.”

“Superwoman,” she said correcting herself. He didn’t laugh at or acknowledge her joke. This came as no surprise. He never laughed at other people’s jokes. He could analyze jokes, tell you why they were successful or technically funny despite getting no laughs but he couldn’t admit that anyone else could be funny, in his insecurity it could only mean he lacked talent.

He waited again. It felt like a long time.

“A girlfriend.” She knew his feelings were hurt. It gave her a sweet rush like stealing candy from a grocery store. “Stacy. Her boyfriend got drunk and got all weird about the guns again.”

“She really needs to kick him out.”

“That’s why I went out with her. Otherwise I would have been there.”

She was glad to have found an excuse to miss his set. She dreaded going. He had been doing the exact same set, jokes, facial expressions and pauses, the entire time they had been sleeping together. She was obliged to laugh. He was constantly gauging the audience and the success of his set based on her reactions.

“Your face is like a beacon to me,” he claimed. She was convinced she could do the material as well, if not better, than him.

“Didn’t she have anyone else she could commiserate with?”

“She needed my support Jason.”

“I needed your support.”

“Can I call you right back?” she asked and hung up when he agreed. They all agreed, did whatever she asked (which wasn’t much, normally getting high at her place and watching television), told her she was unlike anyone they had ever met. In the beginning, after the divorce (which she referred to privately as “the incident”) it helped - being singled out and all that fawning attention. It was just the admission price into her bed. She tried to convince herself it wasn’t about the sex but what else could it be about? For them or her?

Examining herself in the mirror one bloodshot morning, as one of them (and they were just that - a mass ‘them’) lie reflected behind her on the bed she alone had purchased (with a swelling of pride that brought a chuckle of tears in the furniture store parking lot) she concluded, “Pretty, but no masterpiece.” Anyway, they never were seeking anything long term and she would never marry again, at least not until Madeline had grown. Madeline was the reason she got up in the morning, grocery shopped, purchased a Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving, didn’t sink into oblivion that desired her with the strength of a thousand sirens.She took another hit, then another.

In these moments, alone, in the garage, after work, before the logistics of feeding the fish and (God forbid) herself, before the monolithic despair of loneliness pressed down upon her, before sleep, and the prospect of another numbing day of work she felt, well, not happy and not quite content, although that was closer, but the distance between her and the life she had never asked for, didn’t care for and tried to avoid at all costs drew close enough to convince her to go on. Her life, never bountiful, had shrunk.

She unhooked her bra and pulled it off through her sleeve, stripped down to her underwear and crawled into bed. 7:30. Did she have Madeline tomorrow or the day after? The thought that it might not be the day after tomorrow, her day off, filled her with an ocean of anxiety. How would she fill an entire day? She could paint Madeline’s room. Even if she could find the strength to get out of bed on her day off it would be a week before she went to Home Depot, another deciding between the purple samples, weeks to get back to the store that wasn’t a mile away and buy the paint and months before she convinced whoever she was sleeping with at the time to paint it for her.

This was a despicable thought best avoided.

She took several deep breaths. It did not help. Eventually after coming up with a makeshift plan that included everything except painting her daughter’s room: clean the house, go grocery shopping, see if Deborah could go to lunch at that Chinese buffet she loved (none of which she would end up doing) she drifted off to sleep.The phone rang.

“Can I come over?”

“I’m already in bed. I was asleep. I had a not-so-great day.”

“Oh.”

She waited for the protracted follow-up and inevitable imposition but started to drift.

“We don’t need to hangout.”

She had no idea what she saw in the comedian. It wasn’t his looks. He was fat, bald and buck toothed. She had a hard time looking at him straight on but like the sun had to approach him sideways or by squinting. But looks weren’t everything and she prided herself on seeing past appearances. At least that’s the lazy logic she fell back upon when her friend Sarah pointed out what a troll he was and refused to speak to her for a week. He was funny. At least when he wasn’t on stage. He knew an interesting group of people. And I get out instead of smoking weed and staring at the television, she thought.

“I just told you I’m in bed Jason.”

“Isn’t this a day without Madeline?”

“Yes.”

"I mean we get so little time.”

“Can I just come over and sleep with you. Not sex,” he said hurriedly, as she seemed less and less interested in that. “Just in the bed with you. I just want to be near you. My set went poorly, just like you had a not-so-great day,” he said parroting her words, “and I need you.”

She waited a long time before answering. The night before she left Luke they had been at some family function, circling each other without ever making contact. She watched as he listened to her mother tell a story, smiling politely, hating every second. For some reason she leaned over, put her hand on his wrist and whispered, “We’ll be together forever.” She didn’t know what she saw in her ex-husband either.

I’ll leave the door open,” she said into the phone pretending to forget that the comedian never asked to help her get into the house he now so desperately wanted to enter.

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​David Haight received a degree in English and later an MFA in writing from Hamline University where he was distinguished by the Quay W. Grigg award for Excellence in Literary Study. He published the novel Overdrive in 2006, Me and Mrs. Jones in 2012 and Lemon, a collection of short stories in 2015. He is working on a second collection of short stories.